The Birds

Overview

The Birds ran to about seventeen hundred and fifty lines, which makes it the longest Greek comedy we have, and it took second prize at the City Dionysia in 414 BCE. It is usually described as Aristophanes’ finest play, and it is certainly his strangest.

Old Comedy normally works by attacking somebody. Clouds goes after Socrates, Knights after a politician, Wasps after the jury system. The Birds attacks nobody in particular. Instead it takes an absurd premise and follows it with complete seriousness through cosmology, civil engineering, diplomacy and a wedding, and the fun is in the thoroughness.

The date matters and is hard to interpret. The previous summer Athens had sent the largest expedition in its history to conquer Sicily, and in the weeks before it sailed the city had gone through a religious panic over the mutilation of the Herms, with denunciations, exiles and executions. A comic poet in 414 had a great deal available to him. What he wrote was a play in which two men leave Athens because of the lawsuits, and end up ruling the world. Some readers find a savage allegory of imperial overreach in that. Others point out that the war is barely mentioned and read it as the one play where Aristophanes simply enjoyed himself.

A note on the poetry. The bird choruses are the most beautiful lyrics in comedy, and most translations treat them as filler between the jokes. If a version makes the nightingale passage or the theogony sound like doggerel, it is losing half the play.

What happens

Two elderly Athenians stumble about the countryside, one carrying a crow and the other a jackdaw, which are supposed to be guiding them. They are looking for Tereus, the man from the myth who was turned into a hoopoe, because a bird who used to be human should know of a comfortable city somewhere. What they want, they explain, is a place with no summonses, no informers and no litigation, which rules out everywhere they can think of.

The hoopoe, when found, is moulting and unimpressive. They describe what they are after. Then Peisetairos stops, struck, and puts the real proposal: the birds are older than the gods, they held the kingship of the world before Zeus, and they have let it be taken. Build one walled city in the air, and you sit between heaven and earth. Demand tribute from men below. Blockade the smoke of sacrifice so nothing reaches Olympus, and the gods will starve.

The birds arrive as a hostile mob, recognise two humans, and nearly kill them. Persuaded to listen, they are convinced, and Peisetairos is elevated from refugee to founder.

The parabasis follows, where the chorus address the audience directly in the poet’s voice. Here they give the birds’ own theogony: Chaos, Night, black Erebus, a wind-egg, and Eros with golden wings, from whom everything else descends. It is a parody of Hesiod and simultaneously the loveliest thing in the play.

The wall goes up, built by cranes and pelicans and woodpeckers, and the second half is a parade of Athenians who have heard about a new city and want something from it. A priest with an endless invocation. A bad poet with an ode already written. An oracle-monger with verses to fit any occasion. Meton, a real Athenian astronomer, with instruments for laying out the streets geometrically. An inspector. A man selling decrees. A boy who wants a law allowing him to beat his father. Cinesias, an actual dithyrambic poet, who wants wings. An informer, who likes the idea of serving summonses faster. Each of them is thrown out, usually with violence.

Then the gods begin to feel the blockade. Iris is intercepted flying through without a permit. Prometheus sneaks in under a parasol so Zeus cannot see him, and reports that the Olympians are starving and the barbarian gods to the north are worse, and advises Peisetairos to settle for nothing less than Basileia, Sovereignty, who keeps Zeus’ thunderbolt and everything else worth having.

The embassy arrives: Poseidon, who has standards, Heracles, who wants to concede immediately because there is roast bird, and a Triballian god from somewhere barbaric whose contributions are incomprehensible noise and whose vote is decisive. Heracles is persuaded by an argument about inheritance law that is both legally sound and entirely irrelevant to gods. They surrender.

The play ends with Peisetairos entering in triumph, thunderbolt in hand, with Basileia beside him, while the chorus sing a wedding hymn to the new master of the universe.

How to read it

Read the introduction and the notes. More than in any other Aristophanes, the second half is a string of named contemporaries, and a translation without notes turns the best sequence in the play into a list of strangers being hit.

Read the parabasis at lines 676 to 800 properly and slowly. It is the poetry the play is built around, and it explains why a comedy about two grumbling old men is regularly called the finest Greek comedy.

Watch Peisetairos rather than the jokes. His name means something like Persuader-of-his-Companion, and he moves from fugitive to orator to founder to tyrant to god without a single scene of resistance. The play never comments. Whether that silence is delight or judgement is the central interpretive question.

Notice how the new city fails to be different. They escape Athens and rebuild it: officials, decrees, a sacrifice, taxes on passing traffic, an informer wanting work. The satire is not on Athens’ enemies but on the idea that you could get away.

Do not look for a consistent position on the war. Aristophanes wrote antiwar plays and this is not one of them, and the attempts to read Sicily into every scene mostly collapse. What it does share with that moment is a mood: a city convinced, in the year before its fleet was destroyed, that it could take anything it wanted.

Questions it raises

• Peisetairos gets everything and nobody stops him. Is the ending a triumph, and if so whose?
• The birds are told they were robbed of an empire and should take it back. Does the play think their claim is better than Zeus’, or just newer?
• Two men leave Athens to escape its institutions and immediately rebuild them. Is that a joke about Athens or about cities?
• The gods are defeated by cutting off sacrifice. What does that say about what the play thinks a god is?
• Aristophanes wrote this with the Sicilian expedition at sea and hardly mentions it. Is that evasion, tact, or the point?
• The play ends with a marriage to Sovereignty and a hymn. Does Old Comedy’s obligatory happy ending sit easily on this plot?